Don’t believe in global cooling, state climatologist says

The outgoing Washington climatologist was making what has to be one of his last major addresses in that role today — he’ll soon start splitting his time between the University of Washington and his new job in Oregon — to about 600 planners, scientists and others interested in climate change.

Philip Mote

Specifically, the all-day conference at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center is digging into the new report analyzing the future effects of climate change on Washington. Here’s our story on the report.

You may have been hearing that the earth has entered a period of global cooling. Some of Dateline Earth’s frequent — if perhaps less-than-expert — correspondents have brought this up. It turns out that the last three years have been the coolest in awhile, Mote told the 600 or so people assembled today.

To be specific, they were three of the coolest years in the last 15 or 20. But if you look over the last century or so, they were about average, Mote said. So you can’t start talking about “global cooling” anytime soon:

That would be like saying, ‘Well, the stock market had a good week last week, so the recession must be over.’ You can’t project the future based on short periods. We cannot conclude based on the last few years that global warming is over.

Nor should we read much about the global situation into the fact that Seattle has seen significant snowfall for several years running now:

Deducing anything from that climate record would be like saying, ‘I have one stock, and it’s up, so the recession must be over.’

Mote went on to a make a great analogy between climate change and curling. Yep, we’re talking about that Canadian-flavored sport that looks like a combination between bowling, shuffleboard, hockey and sweeping the kitchen floor.

You know how in curling they have to push that big…. thing… down an alley and try to get it to stop at a certain spot? Remember that.

In projecting where the temps will go, scientists must first consider the various scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, Mote said. There’s no way to know where we’ll end up, policy-wise, and what that will mean in terms of emissions.

OK, so far, so good. We get that.

Next, though, scientists also are not sure just how sensitive the globe and its atmosphere are, global warming-wise, to those emissions scenarios. Here’s where the curling analogy comes in. You know how they push that big … thing? (It’s a granite stone, Wikipedia tells me.)

We are all that curling player who gives the stone a push. We’re about to give that thing a push. We’ve already started, actually. Whenever we can reduce emissions is analogous to when the player lets go. After that, does the stone go a long way? “Or do we have a very unresponsive climate that will stop at a few degrees” increase?

Mote addressed the handful in the audience who held up their hands when he asked about who had watched the Canadian sport:

I’m sorry to pick on curling, but it was the best analogy I could come up with for climate sensitivity.

Update 7:47 p.m.: I stepped out of the room for a while and apparently when I was gone, Mote answered a question about the press’s role in all this climate stuff by commending my reporting. For the record, I want to make it clear that I did not hear Mote’s kind words and wrote the nice things I did about Mote above before learning about them.